Hi Sophie! In my opinion, Plato's views on knowledge shifted around in a number of important ways over his career, but you're right to say that he always treats knowledge as having at least some innate aspects. In Book V of the Republic, for example, he characterizes knowledge as a kind of power that is innately within us, but--as a power, rather than a state--this account also recognizes the possibility of developing that power, or allowing it to wither. Much of the discussion of Books VI and VII of the Republic concern how to develop this power--how to "empower it," as it were) through the right educational curricula and with the use of what Plato calls "summoners" (by which he means things that summon the exercise of this power, rather than the inferior cognitive powers of belief or sense perception. There is, accordingly, a social aspect (via education) even in Plato's account. When philosophers these days talk about "social epistemology," it can mean various things. But a "social...

What? You want a quickie bloggy-type answer for a question that would merit (at least) a whole book? OK, but be warned: what you are looking for is much, much more complicated and richer than the following answer (or, perhaps any bloggy-type answer) could indicate. Knowledge is usually conceived as simply being in the best--or at any rate, a sufficiently good--kind of position in one's cognitive relation to the thing in question. Knowledge is generally regarded as requiring something like a truth condition (if what you think is false, you don't know), a belief condition (if you don't believe something, you can't know it), and some other condition (usually called "justification" or "warrant") that shows why the true belief in question actually fulfills whatever other standards apply to distinguish between knowledge and other forms of true belief--after all, one can have true beliefs about something and still not know it. For example, if I believe something that's true, but for the wrong...

I think your question presupposes that "emotion" is a fairly simple phenomenon, whereas I suspect that it is extremely complex. But let's sidestep that concern and just try a simple case out. Scientist A believes that he will very much impress his lover if he unlocks the secret to some phenomenon. Scientist B has no such motivation (and, let us suppose, no other motivator that makes him as eager as A's desire to impress his lover), but works on the same problem. In this case, it looks to me as if scientist A's success (if he achieves it) will be partly explicable in terms of his emotional motivation, whereas that would not be the case for B. Indeed, it seems reasonable to think that A's emotional motivation might provide stronger motivation than we would find in B. On the other hand, we might worry that A's emotional motivation might also cloud his judgment somewhat, and make him more likely to make mistakes. But this much seems obvious, such an "extrinsic" motivator can certainly function...

Not sure you are going to feel much happier after you read my answer to your question, but let me try at least to tell you what philosophers generally do in response to this sort of question these days. Your question raises the specter of what is called global skepticism--the idea that we can't or at least don't know anything at all. There are different sorts of responses one might have to this claim, but also different sorts of responses to the kinds of existential questions that you are associating with the skeptical threat. So let's try first to do what most contemporary epistemologists actually don't do, and that is to grant the threat of skepticism and concede that we cannot remove it. OK, so you don't know anything! Well, the main reason you would think that is because you have in mind extremely high standards for what can count as knowledge. Alright, so maybe we can't meet such high standards. Does that mean it would be reasonable to worry that "a clock might...

This is not a disproof, so much as a way to think about what is obviously wrong with solipsism: To whom do you take yourself to be asking this question? (What would it be like to take solipsism really seriously in the practical domain?)

Your question engages the epistemology of testimony, which has recently gotten lots of attention among epistemologists. But let's try to get a bit clearer on what the issue is. First, please understand that justification comes in degrees. If someone I don't know runs up to me and tells me that the president has been assassinated, I have some justification for believing it. But I certainly can't be said to know it, because that kind of testimony is not enough justification to "clear the bar." So epistemologists don't ever really accept that knowledge is justified true belief, where by "justified" they mean to count any level of justification as sufficient. Secondly, one way to think about justification through testimony is to ask whether there is other evidence available. Back to my stranger telling me about the assassination. I notice that there is a TV store nearby and can see what is playing on the screens. I see no evidence of an assassination. Now how good is the...

Epistemologists sometimes distinguish between different kinds of knowledge, and then they debate whether all of these kinds really are different, or whether they can (some or all) be reduced to a single kind. The kind of knowledge you seem to have in mind is generally called "propositional" knowledge (where what is known is a proposition, such as 'the cat is on the mat' which you would probably count as a fact). Our cognitions of facts may have propositional content (this is sometimes also debated), or perhaps our cognitions of such things may be encoded in a different way--such as with a visual image, map, or blueprint, etc.) So some epistemologists prefer to talk about "informational" knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge, because perhaps the information that is known is not encoded propositionally. But anyway, I assume it is this sort of knowledge that you have in mind. But I also think there are other kinds of knowledge that might be distinguished from "factual" knowledge. Here is...

I think it is not known at all! It is a hypothesis that no one (including Descartes) actually believes, much less knows. So I don't think your question actually applies...

Your question cannot be answered without some specification of what knowledge is--what counts as knowledge. This topic is extremely controversial among epistemologists. But I think one aspect of your question allows at least a part of an answer to it. Epistemologists may not agree on the entire analysis of knowledge, but most agree that whatever is known must be true, and most agree that in order to know something you at least have to believe it. The real controversies tend to begin when epistemologists debate what is now often called the "warrant" condition, which is the purposely vague expression used to denote whatever else is needed for knowledge, other than true belief--or to put it slightly differently, whatever it is that distinguished knowledge from other species of true belief. Now think a little bit about the (relatively uncontroversial) belief condition. What does it mean to believe something? One thing belief is often supposed to include is a dispositional component. ...

It depends on your theory of knowledge, but several theories would support the idea that someone with ordinary cognitive capacities could actually know nothing. Obviously the most important such theory is the one known as "global skepticism," which holds that absolutely everyone knows nothing! We might have justified beliefs, even justified true beliefs, according to this theory, but never justified enough to qualify as knowledge. Other theories might hold that a person would know nothing if that person's cognitive capacities were sufficiently damaged or defective. So a "reliabilist" about knowledge is one who thinks that we have knowledge only if we have a true belief that is generated or sustained in a way that reliably produced true beliefs. This obviously requires that the knower have the capacity to produce true beliefs reliably, so one who did not have such a capacity could never know anything (even if he or she might still sometimes have true beliefs). Obviously, this would have to...